A new mural adorning the west wall of The Right Slice pie and pastry shop in Kalaheo received its final strokes Friday at the Papalina Road stop light at Kaumuali‘i Highway.
“This is the student collaborators’ last day,” said Seth Womble, muralist and founder of Nirmana, the mentor program that the students were working under.
“The students go back to school, but I’ll be back some time in February to do some final shading. The students may choose to come back at that time, but I’ll be back. This is all their project from the start,” he said.
Originally scheduled to be completed by the new year, the mural’s schedule was set back by the weather interrupting the team’s workflow.
“We were sitting at Kaua‘i Kookie across the street during the rain,” said Erin Hunt, one of the student collaborators, along with Quinn Costarella and Sofia Saunders. “After playing around with several designs, we thought this would be a good fit. It’s ‘Mo Please.’ It’s whatever you want it to be.”
Womble said the project is about creative problem-solving and meant to get students to be creative in solving problems. He said it’s also about having artists have confidence in the value of their work, receiving compensation for their art and not just giving it away.
“This mural is a play on words,” he said. “‘Mo’ can be the curving serpentine shapes with contrasting triangles like mo‘o, or ‘lizard’ in Hawaiian. But, it’s more like ‘Can I have mo’ pie, please.’”
Another obstacle facing the budding artists included the placement of the mural on the west wall of The Right Slice.
“Yeah, it gets really hot when you work in the afternoons,” Saunders said. “That’s why we do this in the mornings, before it heats up.”
Motorists approaching the building from the east can’t see the west wall, and can only see what’s there when they approach the stoplight at Papalina Road. This gives them only a brief taste of what’s on the wall, and a little more time if the stop light is red.
“The collaborators had to do a lot of running back and forth,” Womble said, Costarella perched near the stone wall fronting the adjoining Iglesia ni Cristo church. “They needed the perspective of seeing the work in the same manner motorists would see it.”
With the completion of “Mo’ Please,” Womble said there are some other projects coming this year with the Nirmana program that is a collaborative, youth-mentor project.
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
Look good for kid kine stuff